Frank Flynn served honorably with the US Coast Guard until he retired and went into real estate. Below is his own account of what happened back on August 8, 1956, when he was sailing the Bermuda Triangle in the cutter Yamacraw.

This was my first trip into the Bermuda Triangle. At the time of the incident the weather was absolutely perfect; the sea conditions flat calm; visibility and ceiling just about unlimited—it was just a joy to be out that particular morning.

At about 1:30 in the morning, we observed on the radarscope a solid line approximately 28 miles away. We were a little concerned about it at first; it had a strong resemblance to a land mass. However, a quick check of our navigation equipment indicated that we were right on course approximately 165 miles off shore.

We tracked it and found it was dead in the water. So we carefully approached it and approximately one and a half hours later we got down to about a half of a mile from the radar target, and we carefully moved closer to it.

We came down to about 100 yards from it. At that point we energized the search light and found that we were getting reflections off the mass and that the carbon arc just didn’t seem to penetrate it at all. We moved even closer to it again, with the search light beamed on it, and started a gentle left turn so that we would not encounter this unknown object head on. We moved closer and we sort of nudged it with the starboard wing. We did this two or three times without incident, so we got back to normal cruising speed and started our entry into the unknown mass.

After penetrating it, we found that visibility was just about zero. Shortly after entry, the engine room called up and indicated that they were losing steam pressure; and what was a situation of little concern became one of considerable concern at this point.

We were down to about 4 knots when we decided to come about and get out of there. When we started our turn, that’s when we broke out of the mass.

Now, as to what we might have encountered that night, I really have no way of speculating.

Over the years after this happened I talked to many oceanographers, and none of these people could shed any light whatsoever on what it might have been.

The above statement was first given by Frank Flynn to Alan Landsburg in 1977. To this day, nobody has been able to explain what Flynn and his fellow Guardsmen encountered. No known vapor mass has ever been recorded on radar, nor has any contained anything that could cause a sudden power drain. However, it was during experiments on electromagnetism that the closest type of phenomenon was accidentally created. To explore this, check out the Hutchison Effect.